Houston, we had a problem here

When Brian Young recently announced that he was retiring from full-time puzzle-making, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the puzzling world hoping that he wouldn’t be going full-on cold-turkey and that we’d occasionally still see something interesting popping up from him…

Cue sitting around at IPP41 and Brian says “Here, what do you think of this?” passing over a familiar looking box, that upon closer inspection isn’t familiar at all! Brian’s taken the shell of a standard MI Toys puzzle box and ripped out all of the puzzle-bits… and then replaced them with a little something of his own design – a bit like Kelly Snache’s up-cycling of old tea and cigar boxes.

Brian’s result is a gorgeous looking creation with the majority of an acrylic maze on display inside the box and most of the usual decoration from the original box still there on the outside… there’s a little extra lasered text differentiating it from the original donor puzzle – if the acrylic maze in the new window wasn’t sufficient.

The blurb on the box gives you the usual warnings [no external tools, no hitting and no gaffer tape (really, we need to say that now?!)] and then goads you into opening the box while noting that gravity may be more of a hindrance than a help… great!(Makes mental note to turn on local gravity field displacement device.)

A bit of inspection shows there’s a little ball bearing in that acrylic maze, so clearly you know what you have to do… and that kept me amused for a while, until I ran out of things to do and all the things I’d tried weren’t exactly being useful… so after a little thought, and some experimentation, and reminding myself of the devious fellow behind this bit of up-cycling, I found some really interesting things… and then a whole new world opened up to me – now we’re away to the races!

…and there I stopped, making no further progress – but having done enough that I know I want a copy and I tell Brian that – and I think he allows himself a bit of a smile knowing that he’s stopped me dead in my tracks…

I secure a copy from him at the puzzle party and then have a chance to play with it back at home a couple of weeks later… I can easily retrace those initial steps and find myself back in the same spot once again – thoroughly confuzzled.

A little Think(c) and a fair amount of experimentation until a little more Think(c) makes me ask myself “What if I could…” and that brings a new avenue to explore… and while it doesn’t seem nearly as intricate, it’s doing something new, and that’s usually good thing on a solve…

It is a good thing, and I open the box and get to see all the innards that had me stumped in each of the phases – they’re all elegantly simple, and nicely devious… just the sort of thing that you’d expect from Mr Puzzle himself.

Here’s hoping that Brian’s experiments in retrofitting his own mechanisms into donor boxes continues because this one’s a cracker!

[Brian had a small run of these available for sale at IPP41 - they were all sold.]

Brian Young’s Twisted’s Sister

(Yes, that’s perfectly punctuated!)

I’ve been after a copy of this puzzle for a while now so I was really chuffed when I managed to find a copy at a reasonable price recently. What makes this puzzle really stand out is its presentation: designed to be used as Brian’s exchange for IPP24 in Tokyo, the stand for the disentanglement puzzle resembles a classic Japanese torii, or archway – and I suspect that this little extra probably took as much, if not more effort than making the actual puzzle bits… the effort’s really worthwhile in my humble opinion as it makes this puzzle instantly recognisable.

The disentanglement puzzle itself consists of a pair of identical bent nails joined at the hip. Clearly they’ve been carefully doctored to get them into this situation – nails don’t normally come in gold, do they? Oh, and they’re rather bent!

Fiddling with them produces remarkably few available moves – and even though it might look familiar when you first pick this puzzle up, you’ll soon realise there are a few variants and this one’s different… in fact the difference comes from a discovery while Brian was making up another puzzle altogether.

You’ll solve it eventually but hopefully you’ll have the same “That’s clever!” reaction that I had when I first played with this copy…

Definitely one of the most beautifully presented disentanglements around… and a mighty fine puzzle too! 

 

Abraham’s Well

Short version: Classic puzzle from the master of sequential discovery, Brian Young.

Slightly longer version: When I saw the warning email from Sue about the upcoming release I made sure I’d left a note for myself to check the website on the right day – sure,  there would be 150 copies available on the first day (with another 350 along behind that at some point) but there are lots of puzzlers out there that know just how good Brian’s puzzles are. Add to that those two magical words: “sequential discovery” and you can be sure that there’s going to be a huge amount of interest…

In the end, the ordering process was pretty straight-forward and I even managed to add a couple of other things to the order that I’d been meaning to pick up for a while, as well as some of their discounted own-brand disentanglements (mainly because I’m rubbish at those and desperately need the practice!).[That first batch only lasted 12 hours...!]

EMS then teased me for over a week with my care package apparently sitting on the tarmac in Brisbane being “Processed by air carrier” daily, but seemingly making no headway whatsoever. Once or twice Nigel and I swapped messages as both of our packages seemed to be stuck in the same limbo… and then all of a sardine, that changed and AusPost let me know my parcel had landed in the UK… and a day or two later it duly arrived in Barnt Green… this past Friday…

Yesterday I took it out for a bit of a play and found myself getting somewhat hooked on it – it makes for a nice little hand-full. There’s some lovely silky wood for the base and some very neat brass and steel work on the upper half. It thoroughly looks the part – right down the etched brickwork on the sides of the well. There’s a little bit of rope hanging down into the brass-lined(!) well, but no apparent pail. As you’d expect, there’s the usual Mr Puzzle branded logo on the base… and ostensibly, that’s all!

A closer examination yields a hole in the brass well-lining, and the cross-bar at the head of the well seems to turn forever… those two little screws at the head of the well may well have knurled edges, but there’s no way that you’re going to undo those without a more appropriate tool than your hands.

And that dear reader, is it… nothing seems to move, nothing seems untoward – there is nowhere to go… so you might as well start puzzling a little more seriously now. Or decide that you’ve bought a well-made ornament for your puzzle cave.

Over the course of Saturday I found myself puzzling in spurts – using my normal attack of puzzle until I get frustrated with a lack of progress – put the puzzle aside and then spending some time Think(c)ing – and return to said puzzle with a new line of attack…

That approach served me quite well over the course of Saturday and by the early evening I had a growing pile of pieces, some of which had been pretty handy as tools and I was more or less running out of places to go on this little puzzle – which concerned me a little as I knew I wasn’t finished yet: Brian is clear that when you’re finished, you’ll know it and you'll have a pewter object that links the well and Australia (which is all rather intriguing).

I knew I wasn’t finished as I hadn’t found anything made of pewter yet…

So I left it on the desk in bits and returned to it again this morning… and managed to spot something I’d overlooked the night before and a couple of minutes later I had my little pewter prize in my sweaty little paws… with a huge grin on my face.

Abraham’s Well shows that Brian’s not only a great designer of puzzlers’ puzzles, but he also has a wicked sense of humour… early on I thought I really wanted something, and Brian delivered – exactly the wrong thing! I’m pretty certain that he knew exactly what he was doing – I can see him sitting there saying to himself “Let’s get their hopes up and then crush them – it’ll be fun!”.

Brian’s description of the puzzle talks about having twenty odd bits and pieces by the time you’ve taken it all apart, with quite a few of them being quite useful little tools – only, working out which of them are tools and which aren’t is at least half the fun. [I imagined some wonderfully complicated tools during the course of my solve!]

Having got to the end of the solve, and then reassembling it for the requisite photographs, I knew which puzzle I was going to be writing about this week – in fact I’m probably not going to shut up about how good this one is for a while!

If you missed out on the first batch, there’s another 350 of them along in due course… Brian’s hoping to have them in his shop for a while… I’m not sure how successful he’s going to be at that – it is an excellent puzzle – you (and all of your puzzling friends) will want one.

L Burr

I recently managed to pick up a copy of Juno’s L Burr. For some stupid reason I’d missed out on getting Brian’s Limited Edition puzzles in 2012 and I’ve been keeping an eye out for them recently… two down, three to go, I think.

This is another rather whacky puzzle from Juno where the numbers really don’t tell you anything about this puzzle! It’s “just” a 6-piece level 4 burr – but that doesn’t tell you anything about the real puzzle here.

Juno began playing around with board burr designs around 1990 and soon enough he began to explore variations on the theme, where the boards were perhaps a little morphed. L Burr resulted from that rather fruitful search. Each “board” has an L-shaped profile when viewed from the ends and that enforces some interesting restrictions when things begin to go together. Now remember that back in 1990 we didn’t have the wonder that is BurrTools handily installed on each PC in the house, so Juno designed this one in his head… over the course of a week, and it’s really unusual.

Usually once you’ve extracted the first piece from a six-piece burr, things get a whole lot simpler – after all, you’ve removed a source of several of the limitations, so the bits that are left must be easier to manipulate… right?

Wrong!

L Burr lets you proceed in a fairly traditional manner to remove the first piece after four moves… and indeed from there there are a number of routes open to the intrepid puzzler, but apparently none of them are any use whatsoever… time to Think(c).

Of course, there is a way forward, but it’s fair to describe it as pretty non-traditional and if you aren’t exactly a burrista (and I sure as heck aint!) this will invariably put the fear of all things holey into you.

Reassembly is best described as an “interesting” challenge… one I’m rather proud of being able to achieve – it took a bit of out-of-the-box thinking and was rather satisfying.

If you like board burrs, this is definitely one worth playing with – it will mess with quite a lot of your preconceptions of how these puzzles should work… definitely a puzzler’s puzzle!

Brian Young’s Ages

Everyone who’s read Brian’s blurb about Ages knows that it got its name from the estimated time to completion of the BurrTools analysis of the piece set he gave it to chew over – it’s not hard to imagine the poor little program looking at this problem and deciding that this is going to take entire epochs… but Brian was keen to get something interesting out of that analysis so he’s been keeping it running on an old PC for literally years, carefully harvesting the interim results along the way so that when BurrTools runs out of resources and stops in an inelegant manner, he can just restart it where he was and not go right back to the beginning of the road again. 

OK, so Brian’s been working on this one for a long time… he’d decided on the design during the course of last year and had started talking about it at IPP last year, where Gill asked Sue if there was any possibility of getting a copy to me in time for my birthday at the end of September. The girls duly cooked up a sneaky plan and I was presented with a large beautifully wrapped box that housed a life-size(?) baby wombat – the Australian equivalent of the Standard Puzzle Hamster – several little collectible koalas, a copy of Ages and birthday wishes from Brian and Sue. Lucky boy, eh?

I duly took it up to the Northern Puzzle Party, managed to find the obvious first couple of moves – and then nothing!

At some point Ali was playing with it – said something excitedly and ran out of the room…. And then over the course of that afternoon and evening the lads took the whole thing apart and reassembled it… presenting it back to me in its original form so that I could “enjoy” it myself…

It turned out that “enjoyment” lasted FOUR MONTHS!

For the first two months, I explored the first few moves in great detail… by which I mean I kept repeating the same things over and over again expecting something different to happen. At this point, I literally had Brian sticking his tongue out at me, over and over again…

It turns out there’s a really sneaky move right near the beginning and I needed some encouragement in order to make some progress… encouragement received, I progressed and duly found myself in some serious burr territory. I was seriously tied in knots, safe in the knowledge that “this bit” was “just” a burr… and technically it is, but it is an absolute beast of a burr – and it took me about a month to reduce it to a large pile of parts – during which time I realised I was going to need a lot of help to put this thing together again if it wasn’t going to be lying on my desk in pieces for eternity. 

The final stage in the puzzle is to retrieve a little piece of Aussie – and I was pretty sure I knew where to look – only problem was that the things I thought I was trying to open, STRONGLY resembled a single solid lump – finding the way in was a great little final kick in the teeth from this superb puzzle.

This puzzle really is the BEAST that Brian promised in his blurb – it teased and perplexed me for four months, and I’m still dead chuffed with it – that was an awesome birthday present thanks to Gill and Sue’s conniving and Brian’s wonderfully twisted mind. Thanks to all of you!

<Unfortunately, if you’re reading this and think to yourself: I’d like a shot at that, you’re out of luck – Brian sold all 200 copies in less than the time it took me to solve this little guy – in fact he sold them all before I’d even got past the first real hurdle, and I had a head start on it! So I’m afraid you’re going to have to resort to the secondary market if you’d like a copy of this one.>